Colin Harvey – author

As you may have heard, I have an anthology out with Wizard’s Tower Press (yes, really! I can’t believe that I haven’t mentioned it before…). One factor in the book’s eventual success or failure will be the publisher’s online shop which has just opened, selling high-quality e-books with added content at reasonable  prices.*

This will make Dark Spires available to a much wider audience, both in the US and in Europe. And one of the nice ideas Cheryl has had is to add a ‘donate’ button, through which customers can donate directly to the authors. As she said, think of it as a ‘tip’ jar.

Dark Spires will –hopefully–be the first of many such books and I’m looking forward to seeing what else becomes available. To quote Cheryl further, 

“If anyone out there runs a small press, or is an independent author who has made ebooks of their out-of-print back catalog, and is interested in having us stock their books, please get in touch (info [at] wizardstowerpress [dot] com). We will be selective about what we stock, and in particular we will insist on well-made ebooks (though we can help you clean yours up) but I very much want to see the stock grow. Also I want to talk to prospective partners about contract terms to make sure we come up with a deal that people are happy with.”

Do take a look at the site. It’s an exciting time to be an author in the South West of England, and I’ll have further news, on a new project in the not too distant future.

* There seems to be a huge variation in prices for e-book, much more than for dead tree ones, from a dollar or two to fifteen; Dark Spires retails at about five dollars, which seems reasonable, judging by what I’ve seen on Amazon.

Lots and lots of free on-line stuff happening at the moment, so I thought that I’d do a round-up. ‘Stuff’ is like London buses. You get nothing happening for months on end and then -wham!- the world goes mad.

First up on this not-so-sunny Monday morning, my publishers –Angry Robot– posted the first fifty-odd pages of Damage Time on-line over the weekend to read for free.  The whole novel is out in the UK on October on October 7th, and in the US on October 26th. Although US readers can order the electronic copy direct from the Angry Robot web shop on the earlier date.

Today my short story ‘Chameleon’ goes on-line to subscribers at Daily Science Fiction. Since subscription is free you might as well join, rather than waiting for a whole week…or you can wait a week, and it’ll be there waiting for you…

 Meanwhile the lovely Dark Fiction Review have posted a terrific review of Winter Song. It’s terrific not so much because it says nice things about the book –although that’s always nice– but because they picked up on some things that others missed.

And finally, I’ve reviewed Stephen Baxter’s Flood over at suite101.

That’s all for now!

Yesterday morning was another one of those mornings where I looked at the clock and saw that it was 10.15; I’d been working for almost three hours, and I seemed to have nothing to show for it.  I’m sure that you know the feeling…

It wasn’t strictly true that I had nothing to show for my three hours worth, but it was admin stuff, so not very sexy.  Things like sending information off to Andy, the cover artist, so that he could generate a map for Dark Spires.  and setting up a copyright page, among many other things.

Which led me to think how much information is needed for the application for an ISBN number. Here are just some of the things;

• A full list of contributors
• Copies of the title and copyright pages
• A confirmed selling price
• Classification (eg, SF / fantasy / fiction)
• Intended size in millimetres, and number of pages
• And last but not least, a short description of the book.

A lot of this information is dependant on other factors, like edits, etc, so only parts of it are currently available.

And the requirements are perfectly logical but it’s time consuming. Publishers such as Tor or Random House probably have lots of interns running around doing such work. Then again, they publish a lot more books than we do! But hopefully, all this will be worth it when you see the final product.

I’ve posted the list of 2010 Hugo Winners over at Suite101, together with some Hugo trivia.  

In the article I talk a lot about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, particularly in light of the fact that it’s only the fourth novel to win the ‘trinity’ of Hugo, Nebula & JWC. I’m not so naive as to believe that the best novels always win these awards. In fact some stinkers have won individual awards. But over the years they’ve collectively been a good barometer of what exemplifies what we should treasure, and point newcomers to as introductory works to the genre.

A second mini-thought: Nicholas Whyte mentioned on his blog that all five fiction winners were men. When I looked through my scrappy list, I found that the [fiction] winners for the 2000s had the lowest proportion of women of any decade since the 1970s.  Does that mean that Hugo voters are becoming more sexist, or is gender less of an issue in who the voters pick, leading to a greater preponderence of male stories on the ballot? You decide.

Earlier this week, Salon Futura ran the Table of Contents for the Dark Spires anthology.  It’s not quite finalized, as the running order of the last few stories needs to be ironed out (I’ve blogged before about the importance of the order of stories).

But while they thrashed out here is the interim Table of Contents for Dark Spires:

• Sarah Singleton: “The Preacher”
• John Hawkes-Reed: “Pump House Farm”
• Adam Colston: “Cobalt Blue”
• Joanne Hall: “Corpse Flight”
• Colin Harvey: “Spindizzy”
• Eugene Byrne: “Spunkies”
• Christina Lake: “The Sleeper Stone”
• Guy Haley: “Outside”
• Liz Williams: “Milk”
• Roz Clarke: “Last Flight To West Bay”
• Gareth L. Powell: “Entropic Angel”

I’ll talk more about the the anthology nearer the launch date of November 6th.

It’s been a busy old morning with lots happening, so if this string of bulletin points sounds a bit breathless, that’s maybe because it is.

First of all, so much for the power of 31. Anne and Brian’s baby girl decided not to hang around until the end of the month, but instead emerged into the world at about 6.30 am yesterday morning. I’m delighted for them.

Also soon to emerge into the world is ‘Chameleon,’ my flash story that will available to  subscribers of Daily Science Fiction in the first week of September.

Finally, the podcast of my panel on ‘The Future of the Future’ is up at alt.fiction’s website.

Right, time I sorted out some lunch.

You may have noticed a distinct lack of bloggage lately — not only have I been head down on Ultramassive (three-quarters of the way through), but I’ve also been flat out editing the subs for Dark Spires, and on top of that I’ve had Leee at Angry Robot c-cracking the whip.

But now I’m within 19 days of finishing the Ultramassive draft, and the last sub  for the anthology is in, so come September I might even take a day or two off. Although there’s Mrs H’s birthday to sort out.

So I’d better get on with some shopping….

I’ve posted the second of  what is now three parts on editing over at Suite101, detailing what I do with a submission when I receive it.

One unexpected side effect of spending so much time on less than a dozen submissions is that I’m finding it a real battle writing my 1500 words each day. I have enormous admiration for those writers who can work on one book in the morning, and then focus on another in the afternoon.  My next task is work out how I can mentally multi-task.

More tomorrow on editing, though.

This morning has been one of those great mornings when it’s a pleasure to be a writer.

I finished ‘Spindizzy’ my story for Dark Spires over the weekend, or rather, I finished the main part of the narrative. I needed to write some short inserts that are pastiches of Golden Age SF. I started out fairly restrained, but as the morning progressed the battles got ever bigger, the villains more villainous and the women more beautiful. All in the space of a thousand words!

I’d almost forgotten how much fun SF can be.

Meanwhile the other stories have started to come in, and I’m enjoying reading them.

Tomorrow worn’t be quite so enjoyable, as it’s my stepfather’s funeral, so no blog tomorrow, and then it’s back to work on Ultramassive on Wednesday.

Today’s 1400 words duly done, but what a horrible, horrible slog it was — unlike yesterday, when I surged past the quota and probably wrote over 2000 words in total.

I suspect that part of the reason I struggled is because I awoke at about 4am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Consequently I’m red-eyed and sluggish of thought this morning (and tetchy, for the benefit of any EOn, Npower or other bloody salesmen who come to our gate to incur the wrath of Tourette’s Dog).

Or rather, I was just drifting back to sleep when the alarm went off.

This is nothing unusual, of course. Millions of people suffer sleep deprivation on a regular basis.

Some years ago Science News ran an article which stated that ‘normal’ sleep consists of several hours of deep sleep followed by waking up for an hour or two, then a return to a slightly lighter sleep for the balance of the night.  It’s this last stretch and its dreams that we tend to remember on waking.

What screws it up is the presence of the alarm clock which either brutally interrupts that sleep, or because we’re aware that it’s going to go off, renders us unable to relax and return to the arms of Morpheus.

Hmmm, note to self. If inventing time machine, first call is to man who invented the alarm clock…